Chuggnutt!

Month: June 2022

  • What can be done

    The overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court is disheartening, nauseating, disturbing; an act of sexual violence against women writ large, simultaneously a symbolic sexual assault of every woman in America and a stripping away of privacy and rights to healthcare and bodily autonomy. Women now have less rights in America than a gun; according to the GOP, women are less than human.

    What can be done about it? What can we do? This is my brain dump of answers to those questions.

    What can we do?

    • Men, check in with the women in your lives, and in particular, let them know they are supported.
    • Donate to Planned Parenthood, and similar organizations.
    • Volunteer with Planned Parenthood, and similar organizations.
    • Speak up. Call and write your Congressional representatives and senators, your state and local government officials, to let them know you support a woman’s right to choose.
    • Join a protest. March.
    • Offer safe haven, if you can, for any woman needing an abortion. Offer transportation and other support. Without judgment. Please go through proper channels for this, though (start with PP and go from there).
    • Engage in your local government—attend city council meetings, school board meetings, and so on, providing a counterbalance to any conservative, Republican, extremist, anti-choice shitbags that attend.
    • Support progressive candidates for office, no centrists, and ask any and every candidate what their views on abortion and women’s health and reproductive rights are.
    • Convince anyone you know (or even don’t know) to vote in the next election, no matter how minor it might be.
    • Boycott any businesses owned by Republicans and/or conservative Christians, that express anti-choice sentiments, that believe abortion should be illegal.
    • Similarly, don’t work for or do business with any company or organization owned by Republicans, or are anti-choice, and so on.

    What can Democrats in government do?

    Right now I’m unbelievably angry, not just at Republicans but also Democrats in government. Why? Because for years we’ve been hammered with the message to VOTE, get out and VOTE, VOTE like your life depends on it—and you know what? We have, and we do.

    What do we have to show for it? We’ve put Democrats into office, put Democrats in control of the Presidency and both houses of Congress, and for what? We keep waiting for them to do something, to take action against the Republican agenda that somehow, somehow, keeps getting pushed through, even though Republicans have a minority.

    And instead of taking action, every time something bad happens, Democrats in power tell us once again, VOTE to make change, and donate more money to “help them fight.”

    Bullshit. We’ve been doing that and they aren’t doing what we put them in office for. Yet there are things they can be doing right now. Forget playing nice, forget being fair, or statesmanlike; Republicans certainly aren’t interesting in any of that. Are they scared of retribution? Of what the Republicans will do if they gain power again? Guess what, Republicans have already said they will do that, and they will. There’s nothing to lose here.

    Off the top of my head:

    • Eliminate the filibuster.
    • Initiate impeachment proceedings against four illegitimate Supreme Court Justices: Clarence the Harasser Thomas for participating in the January 6 insurrection with his wife; and Neil Gorsuch, Brett the Rapist Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett for lying under oath during their confirmation hearings. These latter two, in particular, are completely unqualified to be judges in general. Then go after the other conservative justices who lied under oath.
    • Expand the Supreme Court to 11 or 13 members. Or more.
    • File charges and/or impeach every Republican member of Congress who were involved with the January 6 insurrection and trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
    • Remove every ones of these same Republicans from any committees and active roles in making legislation.
    • Remove Senator Joe Manchin from any role and committee and position of power and responsibility in the senate; he’s all but a Republican and has handed the GOP success after success. Sideline him.
    • Stall every bill, every piece of legislation that comes from Republicans. Every one. Gridlock them into limbo, nothing gets debated on, considered, or passed.
    • Remove every Trump-era government official and replace them with someone competent and trustworthy.
    • Act. Just fucking act on something, do something, don’t sing songs outside of the building, don’t read poetry, don’t tell the rest of us to vote and do your job for you. Do your goddamn job.

    This Twitter thread by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also lays a blueprint for what Democrats in office can actually do right now.

    Yes, to be clear, we need to continue to vote, and vote like our lives depend on it—because they do. But we really, really need to see some results from our voting. Otherwise this shit will keep happening.

  • Trigger warning

    It’s time to repeal the Second Amendment.

    There, yes, I said it. It’s a poorly-worded, grammatically ambiguous (at best) concession of a “right” that is neither inalienable nor logical, written into the Bill of Rights by white men of privilege who also believed it was acceptable to own other human beings (who they didn’t even conceive of as fully human).

    This is the text of the Amendment:

    A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

    Annotated Constitution on Congress.gov

    This is some bullshit. It’s about protecting the “right” of (white) people to own weapons so they could constitute a “Militia,” on a state level as opposed to a federal military. Do you know what the purpose of the militia was, at that time?

    The answer you’re taught in school is to be a check against government tyranny, fresh on the minds of those who oh-so-recently threw off the yoke of British rule. Sure, sure, maybe.

    The real purpose of the state militias was to suppress insurrections. But, hmmmm, what sort of insurrections could they possibly have been worried about?

    Slave rebellions, of course. The white population lived in fear of insurrection from a subjugated Black population that vastly outnumbered them.

    (Naturally, there are going to be those of you who immediately try to counter with “But Shays’ Rebellion…” or “But the Whiskey Rebellion…” Don’t. Just don’t. Go read your history.)

    The main function of the militia, particularly in the southern states, was to police the slaves. Slave states were worried that without such a right spelled out in the Constitution, they would be unable to prevent insurrections by the enslaved, which to them posed the gravest threat. So the Second Amendment was adopted as a concession to the slaveholders and to preserve slavery.

    It’s a racist artifact that should have been omitted.

    Ohhhh look out, did I just engage in CRT???

    I’ll be clear: there is no inherent, inalienable right to own a gun, especially not a military-grade automatic weapon, despite what the gun perverts will tell you and despite what a bunch of racists insisted get codified in the Bill of Rights.

    The Second Amendment today is used by the gun perverts and Republicans as a shield, enabling them to do what they do best—enable (if not outright perpetrate) the mass murder of children in schools. And people in shopping malls, grocery stores, churches, at concerts, on the street, and so on. It’s sick.

    It’s time to repeal the Second Amendment.